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Wikipedia's goal is not merely to be a directory of things and people that currently exist today – defunct corporations and ghost towns and dead people can still be notable, and can still have legitimate and reliably sourceable reasons why readers might be looking for information about who and what they were.
John Seigenthaler, an American journalist, was the subject of a defamatory Wikipedia hoax article in May 2005. The hoax raised questions about the reliability of Wikipedia and other websites with user-generated content. Since the launch of Wikipedia in 2001, the site has faced several controversies. Wikipedia's open-editing model, under which anyone can edit most articles, has led to concerns ...
The "Wikipedia Forever" fundraising ad (and associated variation on that theme [1]) appear to be widely rejected by the editing community, and the Foundation's claim that readers find it appealing does not appear to be borne out by friends/family of editors.
(The current list of proposed usability improvements includes 9 separate proposals concerning the text editor and the editing process, so this issue is not unknown in the Wikipedia community.) [1] There may be many people out there who would like to contribute but can't, perhaps especially women – Wikipedia is dominated by male editors. [2] [3]
Power users sometimes also threaten to withhold their donations, but some are not donors anyway, and the majority of donors give less than US$100, so making a dent in the multimillion-dollar budget would require a concerted action by a large proportion of the community, rather than a snit by a few power users.
Imagine a Wikipedia where the willingness to donate was allowed to control content and discussions. This is a heavily-trafficked site with high Google ranking on almost any subject it covers. The amount it could make allowing companies to pay for control over their own articles is huge.
The reason for this is not far to seek: those librarians etc. note that anybody can contribute and that there are no traditional review processes. You might hasten to reply that it does work nonetheless, and I would agree with you to a large extent, but your assurances will not put this concern to rest.
A huge number of people - far more than ever donate (and that's totally ok!) can actually afford 20 bucks or 20 euros or 20 pounds. I don't think we want to hint that not being able to afford to give is the only acceptable reason not to give - it's just, you know, if you want to give, and you can afford to give, then please do.--